Pakistani English

English is Pakistan's official language. All government documents, military communications, street signs, many shop signs, business contracts and other activities are done in English. The language of the courts is also English[4]. English is taught to all school level Pakistani students, and in many cases the medium of instruction is also in English[5]. At College and University level all instruction is in English[6]. Pakistan boasts a large English language press and (more recently) media. All of Pakistan's major dailies are published in or have an edition in English, while DAWN News is a major English Language News Channel. Code-switching is very common in Pakistan and almost all conversations in whatever language have a significant English component.

The type of English taught and preferred in Pakistan is British English. It is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere. There is confusion whether the term refers to English as spoken in the British Isles or to English as spoken in Britain.

Pakistani English is non native English. The speech of non-native English speakers may exhibit pronunciation characteristics that result from such speakers imperfectly learning the pronunciation of English, either by transferring the phonological rules from their mother tongue into their English speech ("interference") or by implementing strategies similar to those used in primary language acquisition.[1] They may also create innovative pronunciations for English sounds not found in the speaker's first language.[1] The age at which speakers begin to immerse themselves into a language (such as English) is linked to the degree in which native speakers are able to detect a non-native accent; the exact nature of the link is disputed amongst scholars and may be affected by "neurological plasticity, cognitive development, motivation, psychosocial states, formal instruction, language learning aptitude," and the usage of their first (L1) and second (L2) languages.[2] English is unusual in that speakers rarely produce an audible release between consonant clusters and often overlap constriction times .It is heavily influenced by Pakistan's languages as well as the English of other nations. Many words or terms from Urdu, such as 'cummerbund', have entered the global language and are also found in Pakistan. In addition the area which is now Pakistan was home to the largest garrisons of the British Indian Army (such as Rawalpindi and Peshawar) this combined with the post-partition influence of the Pakistan Military has ensured that many military terms have entered the local jargon.

The standard of English followed in Pakistan is RP( Received Pronunciation). It is also called the Queen's (or King's) English and BBC English—is the accent of Standard English in England, with a relationship to regional dialects similar to that of other European languages. Although there is nothing intrinsic about RP that marks it as superior to any other variety, sociolinguistic factors give Received Pronunciation particular prestige in England and Wales.However, since World War II, a greater permissiveness towards allowing regional English varieties has taken hold in education and in the media in England and Wales.
 

Pakistani English Terms

Pakistani English contains many unique terms, as well as terms which are utilised somewhat differently in Pakistan. Examples.
Open/close the TV (or any object), refers to turning something on or off. This is due to the verbs for to open and to close being the same as the verbs for to turn on and to turn off in Urdu and other Pakistani languages.
Shopper, means a shopping bag, rather than a person who is shopping, the latter is referred to as a customer.
His/her meter has turned means that the person has lost his/her temper. Usually used for a sudden outburst, one which is construed as unreasonable.
Got no lift; received no attention or assistance from the person.
On parade; being at work/ at a set activity. Usually (though not always) in the context of starting something for the first time. For example I have been hired by the company, on parade from next Monday .
Out of Station; being out of the city.
Become a direct Sargent; be promoted out of turn/ given responsibility and authority very early. Often in the context that a person is out of his/her depth. For example, no wonder that team has failed so badly, leader was a direct Sargent. Usually "Sargent" is replaced by "Havildar" the equivalent rank in the Pakistan Army. Also used for upwardly mobile, ambitious or nouveau riche.
Auld Lang Sang; as an idiom to denote the end of an event or a matter, often to convey sadness; for example, my last day at the job, Auld Lang Sang,. Less often the first words of the song are used in a similar way, "Lest Auld acquaintance be forgot".
First Class; means top quality; often used by shopkeepers and salesmen to donate good quality.
Tight; high quality, or aesthetically pleasing and desirable. Often to describe physical attractiveness, usually of females, e.g. Ali is going out with a very tight girl. 

 
Miss is used to address or refer to female teachers, whatever their marital status, e.g. yes I have done my homework miss. Less commonly used to refer to women colleagues or subordinates.
Madam is used to address and refer to females in positions of authority, usually a superior, e.g. madam has ordered me to get the figures for last years sales.Can also be used as a noun, e.g. she is the madam of that department meaning she is the head of the department, without it being derogatory.
Sir; used for a male superior, often combined with their name or used as a noun. E.g. Is Sir in? or Sir Raza wants to see you in his office as soon as possible.
Do the needful; perform/complete or abstain from doing the required action. E.g. I have enclosed the instructions in the letter, please follow and do the needful. Also seen in Indian and Sri Lankan English.
Eve teasing; harassing women. Seen in Indian English also.
Hit for a six; ruined, e.g. I had planned to go to Murree for the weekend, but the blizzard hit that idea for a six. Also seen in Indian and Sri Lankan English.
Well left, avoided artfully, often a tricky situation; from cricket, the term "well left" is applied when a batsman chose not to play a potentially dangerous delivery, e.g. I well left that offer, it could have caused many problems.
Threw/ received a googly, an unexpected situation arose, a person was surprised, often unpleasantly, e,g had just settled down and then got the googly about the transfer. From googly, a delivery in cricket.
Yorker, a sudden, dangerous and potentially devastating situation; similar use to googly, but usually has a certain amount of danger attached to it. my mother's heart attack while we were hiking in the mountains hit like a yorker, we were far from any medical help. From Yorker another type of cricket delivery. Also used in a similar manner; bouncer.
Hit middle stump, did the action in such a manner that there is little room for further action, or a decisive blow, e.g. really hit middle stump last year on that contract
Master Sahib, usually contracted to Ma'Sahib, used to refer to a master craftsman. The term is now however used more frequently to refer to tailors and carpenters.

There are following features of English language in Pakistan.
Pronunciation and grammar

(1) PakE is RHOTIC, tends to be syllable-timed, and shares many features with northern INDIAN ENGLISH. (2) Some pronunciation features are typical of speakers of regional languages: for example, speakers of Punjabi have difficulty with such initial consonant clusters as /sk, sp/ (saying ‘səport’ and ‘səkool’ for sport and school); Urdu speakers also have difficulty with initial consonant clusters (saying ‘isport’ and ‘iskool’ for sport and school); Pashto speakers have no such difficulty, but use /p/ for /f/ (‘pood’ for food). (3) Distinctive grammatical features relate to uses of the verb, article, relative clause, preposition, and adjective and verb complementation, all shared with IndE. Features of the indigenous languages influence use of English and CODE-MIXING AND CODE-SWITCHING are common, including among the highly educated.
Vocabulary

BORROWINGS from Urdu and the regional languages: atta flour, tehsil district, ziarat religious place. LOAN TRANSLATIONS from these languages: cousin-brother. Terms shared with Indian English: crore ten million, lakh one hundred thousand, -wallah a word element denoting ‘one who does something as an occupation’, as with policewallah. Hybrids of English and local languages: biradarism favouring one's clan or family, gheraoed surrounded by protesters in an office or similar place and unable to leave, goondaism hooliganism, thuggish behaviour. English words, especially compounds, adapted for local use: age-barred over the age for (particular work), load-shedding intermittently shutting off a supply of electricity.

To explain there are two visible trends regarded to vocabulary of Pakistani English. The first is to use local words in place of English words. In the context of this society it makes sense, when using English, to say ‘dal instead of ‘pulses’ (but not ‘dalain’ for the plural), or ‘roti’ instead of ‘unleavened bread’, except that one can have many ‘rotis’ in Urdu, whereas ‘ bread’ is uncountable, and therefore singular, in English (note: ‘double-roi’ is a well-established example of an English-Urdu hybrid expression. It is a local differentiation, since ‘bread’ is sufficient for the ‘loal’ connotation in Standard English. Other examples of inter-language compounding are ‘mutton-karahi’, ‘chicken’masala’, ‘bund (bun)-kebab’, ‘separate-chat’, ‘mikus (mixed) chai’ etc.). A person who insisted on using Standard English parallels (such as ‘fenugreek’ for ‘kilonJi’ or ‘cardamon’ for ‘ilaichi’) while speaking English in Pakistan would seem out of place. Most Pakistani English newspapers select words like ‘phuti’, ‘haldi “ ‘moong’, ‘hartal’, ‘gold tezabi’ ‘Azad Kashmir’, ‘modaraba’, ‘Hudood Ordinanc’, ‘ehtesab’, ‘mohtaeb’ ‘venaspati/Banaspati’ and ‘begar’, to mention a few, in preference to English equivalents (if indeed English equivalents exist). Some might be found weasily, like ‘turmeric’for ‘haldi’ or ‘free’ of. ‘azad’. Others’ like ‘hartal’ ‘modaraba’, ‘vanaspati’, ‘mohtaseb’, ‘hadoob’, ‘hundi’, or ‘begar’, would bneed to be explained, if the editor insisted on using British Standard English and nothing but British Standard English. BSE purists in the country might deplore these accretions, but they will probably acknowledge a particle need.

Spelling

The effect of speaking on spelling will be taken up as follows:

Pakistani misspelling include ‘mate’(mate), ‘flate’(flate), ‘carrier(‘(career), ‘areas’ (arrears), ‘balconey’ (balcony), ‘gorment/gornament’ (government), ‘padastal’ (pedestal) “padal’/’paddle’(peddle), ‘pitrawl’ (petrol), ‘markeet’ (market), ‘definitely’ (definitely), ‘refered’ (referred), ‘through’ (through), ‘annexy’ (annex), ‘modren’ (modern), ‘far’ (for), ‘of’ (off), ‘off’ (of), ‘chose ‘ (choose), ‘choose’ (chose), etc., to mention only a few. Less frequently one might see ‘Alumpics/Olumpics’ (Olympics), ‘istam’ (stamp), ‘satation, (station) and ‘mint’ (minute). Problems will also be seen with pairs like ‘affect/effect’, ‘accept/except’ (the Urdu script does not idifferentiate between the sounds clearly, and it has no symbol for the schwa. This sound is very common in English, (although it, too, has no symbol for it), ‘paractice/ppractise’ (this is compounded by the American convention), ‘there/their’, ‘advice/advise ‘loose/lose’ etc., and with separate words like ‘mizzile’ (missile) or ‘deseased/diseased (deceased), e.g., ‘pratyers for the soul of the diseased will be held….’ [indicating some uncertainty with voiced and unvoiced sounds when transliterating in Urdu; sounds sometimes like ‘s’, sometimes like ‘z’, and there is nothing to indicate why this should be so; likewise, ‘c’ is sounds sometimes like s’s’, sometimes like ‘k’. The word’ Asia’ used to be pronounced ‘Aysher’ some tears age. Now ‘Ayzher’ seems to be more common], ‘cheaque’, occasionally even ‘cheek’ or ‘cheak’ (cheque), ‘rooves’ (roofs), ‘vocate’ (voacate), ‘roit’ (riot), ‘lion (lion), ‘currant’ (current), ‘lead’ (for the past form of the verb ‘lead’, a problem obviously caused by the existence of ‘lead’ as the name of the heavy metal) and innumerable others. And for some reason not immediately apparent, ‘simile’ has become ‘simile’, even at advanced levels of study.

Grammar

The indefinite article ‘a/an’ is used for unspecified singular countable nouns. Fact: it can also be used for specific nouns as in the following example, (a) ‘he has a rich wife,’ which specifies the wife (as against ‘he wants to marry a rich w3ife’, which leaves the wife indeterminate). The degree of specificity or non-specificity is often derived from the verb or room or parts of speech, not only the article, which adds another set of dimensions o the learning of this apparently simple rule. It is complicated to learn and difficult to explain, as the explanations might require more vocabulary and structure than the student possesses. Yet if the exceptions are not pointed out side-by-side, false expectations of correctness might be engendered.

Singular nouns should take a determiner, i.e., ‘man is driving car’ is ungrammatical since the two nouns occur without determiners. Fact: sometimes singular nouns not only can but should occur without determiners, e.g. ‘he goes to school every day’ which suggests the idea of ‘schooling’ or education: its meaning changes when determiners such as ‘a’ or ‘the’ are used to indicate indefiniteness or definitiveness, e.g. ‘he goes to a/the school (at the back of the hospital) every day.’ Rules like these are misleading if the idea is to give simple instructions’ and confusing if they are accompanied by a whole string of exceptions.

The determiner ‘the’ is used for specific nouns. Fact: it is also used for indeterminate nouns, e.g. ‘he plays the piano’, which means a general skill for a certain kind of musical instrument, and not a particular piano, unless I is further specified either implicitly or explicitly, e.g. ‘he plays the piano (which is) in the drawing-room’. Likewise, ‘the lion’ is used for a specific lion and for the general specifics. How is one o explain this in English to a class of students whose current vocabulary and linguistic development in the language contain little reference to concepts such as ‘general’ or ‘specific”? Trying to explain it in Urdu, which has no parallel in article usage, might make it worse.

Prepositions might be a lost cause. Sometimes the differences seem innocuous. What need is there to quibble about sitting ‘in’ or ‘in’ a chair, or writing, ‘at/to’ or ‘on’ a certain address? Why should one lie ‘on’, but sleep ‘in’ a bed? Pakistani usage might sound a little strange to Standard English speakers, but no harm is done to communication, at least, no more harm than when an American says, ‘I met with my friend instead of the British, ‘I met my friend’.

The double comparative is encountered commonly, even in the written work of good Pakistani students at the university level. The source of this ‘error’, if one insist on call in it that, is not immediately visible in Urdu, so it is not an example of direct L1 interference. Indirectly, there may be some effect caused by the Urdu way of using an adjunct word or phrase to form comparative and superlative modification, since modifiers in urdu do not show formative changes which parallel the ‘er’, ‘ier’, and ‘est’, iest’ affixes in English.

To Conclude, Pakistani English may now be considered a variety in its own right. However, it should be viewed and approached as a process rather than a product. This is variety of Language still in the making, and if one tries to collect ‘variant items’ at any one level, by taking it as a product, then much data fizzles out in such attempts and code-mixing play an important role in the transformation of English. This is so because English in Pakistan is often used simultaneously or alternatively with other languages-forming a semantically blended discourse, which cannot be studied pulling things apart or out of the context.